Newspapers and magazines are inherently temporary - today they are worth reading, tomorrow they are covering the bottom of the birdcage or wrapped around a fish. It's been that was for as long as there have been newspapers, and for most of what's written in newspapers and magazines, that's not a bad thing.
Blogs have a lot in common with a daily paper. They are short, timely, and basically disposable. The funny thing is, being digital, they stick around.
There are a couple sides to this issue, which I'm still sorting out in my head. First, when there's a really, really good post, it slips on down the page and disappears into the archive just like the ordinary posts. The content is still available to anyone who wants it, but it tends to get lost in the shuffle.
I could create a list of "Best Posts"along the right side of the blog, adding to the clutter that's already there. Not sure I want to...
Then, the stuff that isn't worth keeping tends to stick around too. All this data gets the same treatment. One of the attributes of a Web 2.0 paradigm is that people are able to filter data & give greater weight to the good stuff... but this blog, at least, isn't there quite yet.
6 comments:
Consider incorporating tags, Dan. That would help the search engines pick up your posts. I find it amazing that some of my posts get picked up months after they came to digital life.
That sounds good - and pardon my ignorance, but even tho I know what tags are, I'm not sure how to add them... Any pointers?
Google be your friend:
First hit on search for "tags" led me to this:
http://www.technorati.com/help/tags.html
Other than that, I'm tag-illiterate, too!
Dan, type the word tags into the blogger search engine. It'll tell you how to add them which includes the technorati links. In fact, somewhere in blogger's articles is a neat one that explains how to get you blog exposure.
I did a little looking and it turns out Blogger's Beta version includes "labels" (i.e. tags), but only a small number of people are invited to use the beta version (and I'm not one yet).
So, I'm still looking...
Dan, I found it helpfule to spend a little time reading Lorelle's post (and links) on tagging, then to add the bookmarklet that Rakesh did. It makes it easy to add technorati tags to each post.
http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2006/08/11/an-alternative-version-of-the-popular-technorati-tagging-bookmarklet-available/
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